Marina Raskova
| Marina Raskova | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Мали́нина Мари́на Миха́йловна March 28, 1912 Moscow, Russian Empire |
| Died | January 4, 1943 (aged 30) Saratov Oblast, Soviet Union |
| Occupation | navigator |
| Known for | founding three Russian female air regiments |
Marina Mikhailovna Raskova (Russian: Раско́ва Мари́на Миха́йловна; March 28, 1912 – January 4, 1943) was a famous Soviet navigator. She later became one of over 800,000 women in the military service, founding three female air regiments which would eventually fly over 30,000 sorties in World War II.
Marina Raskova (née Malinina) was born to middle-class parents. Her father was an operatic singer and singing instructor Mikhail Malinin (ru: Михаил Дмитриевич Малинин) and her mother a teacher Anna Liubatovich; a mother’s sister is a known Russian singer Tatyana Liubatovich (ru: Татьяна Спиридоновна Любатович), her brother (for father) is a shipbuilding scientist Boris Malinin. Unlike the majority of Soviet airwomen, Marina did not show any early interest in aviation. She became pilot-navigator purely by accident. Her parents wanted her to become a musician, and her goal was to become an opera singer.
In 1919, when she was seven, her father died from the injuries inflicted as he was struck by a motorcycle. Nevertheless, she continued her drama and singing studies but, being very strict on herself, she started to suffer from stress. She decided to quit music and to devote herself to study chemistry in high school and after graduation in 1929, started to work in a dye factory as a chemist, to help her family. She married an engineer, whom she met at the dye factory, Sergey Raskov, so changing her name to Raskova. She had a child, Tanya, in 1930. The following year she started to work in the Aero Navigation Laboratory of the Air Force Academy as a draftswoman. Raskova became a famous aviator as both a pilot and a navigator for Russia in the 1930s. She was the first woman to become a navigator in the Soviet Air Force in 1933. A year later, she started teaching at the Zhukovskii Air Academy, also a first for a woman. In 1935, she divorced. As significantly in the eyes of the Soviet Union, which gave its aviators celebrity status, she set a number of long distance records. Most of these record flights occurred in 1937 and 1938, while she was still teaching at the air academy.
The most famous of these records was the flight of the Rodina (Russian for "Motherland"), Ant-37 - a converted DB-2 long range bomber, on September 24–25, 1938. She was the navigator of the crew that also included Polina Osipenko and Valentina Grizodubova. From the start, the goal was to set an international women's record for a straight-line distance flight. The plan was to fly from Moscow to Komsomolsk (in the Far East). When finally completed, the flight took 26 hours and 29 minutes, over a straight-line distance of 5,947 km (total distance of 6,450 km).
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